The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
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List of the most influential people
#2751
Richard M. Karp
#2754
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Richard Manning Karp is an American computer scientist and computational theorist at the University of California, Berkeley. He is most notable for his research in the theory of algorithms, for which he received a Turing Award in 1985, The Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science in 2004, and the Kyoto Prize in 2008.
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Paul Sereno
#2755
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Paul Callistus Sereno is a professor of paleontology at the University of Chicago and a National Geographic "explorer-in-residence" who has discovered several new dinosaur species on several continents, including at sites in Inner Mongolia, Argentina, Morocco and Niger. One of his most widely publicized discoveries is that of a nearly complete specimen of Sarcosuchus imperator — popularly known as SuperCroc — at Gadoufaoua in the Tenere desert of Niger.
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Jared Cohon
#2756
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Jared Leigh Cohon served as the eighth president of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. he is a University Professor in the Carnegie Mellon College of Engineering.
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Robert B. Wilson
#2757
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Robert Butler "Bob" Wilson, Jr. is an American economist and the Adams Distinguished Professor of Management, Emeritus at Stanford University. He was jointly awarded the 2020 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, together with his Stanford colleague and former student Paul R. Milgrom, "for improvements to auction theory and inventions of new auction formats". Two more of his students, Alvin E. Roth and Bengt Holmström, are also Nobel Laureates in their own right.
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Raymond Geuss
#2758
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Raymond Geuss, FBA is an American political philosopher and scholar of 19th and 20th century European philosophy. He is currently Emeritus Professor in the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Cambridge. Geuss is primarily known for three reasons: his early account of ideology critique in The Idea of a Critical Theory; a recent collection of works instrumental to the emergence of political realism in Anglophone political philosophy over the last decade, including Philosophy and Real Politics; and a variety of free-standing essays on issues including aesthetics, Nietzsche, contextualism, pheno...
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Menachem Begin
#2759
Overall Influence
1913 - 1992 (79 years)
Menachem Begin was an Israeli politician, founder of Likud and the sixth Prime Minister of Israel. Before the creation of the state of Israel, he was the leader of the Zionist militant group Irgun, the Revisionist breakaway from the larger Jewish paramilitary organization Haganah. He proclaimed a revolt, on 1 February 1944, against the British mandatory government, which was opposed by the Jewish Agency. As head of the Irgun, he targeted the British in Palestine. Later, the Irgun fought the Arabs during the 1947–48 Civil War in Mandatory Palestine and, as its chief, Begin was described by the British government as the "leader of the notorious terrorist organisation".
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Paul Milgrom
#2760
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Paul Robert Milgrom is an American economist. He is the Shirley and Leonard Ely Professor of Humanities and Sciences at the Stanford University School of Humanities and Sciences, a position he has held since 1987. He is a professor in the Stanford School of Engineering as well and a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Research. Milgrom is an expert in game theory, specifically auction theory and pricing strategies. He is the winner of the 2020 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, together with Robert B. Wilson, "for improvements to auction theory and inventions of new ...
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Stanley A. McChrystal
#2761
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Stanley Allen McChrystal is a retired United States Army general best known for his command of Joint Special Operations Command from 2003 to 2008 where his organization was credited with the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq. His final assignment was as Commander, International Security Assistance Force and Commander, United States Forces – Afghanistan . He previously served as Director, Joint Staff from August 2008 to June 2009. McChrystal received criticism for his alleged role in the cover-up of the Pat Tillman friendly fire incident. McChrystal was reportedly kno...
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Gerhard Casper
#2762
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Gerhard Casper is a political scientist who is a former president of Stanford University from 1992 to 2000, a former Dean of the University of Chicago Law School from 1979 to 1987, and a former provost of the University of Chicago from 1989 to 1992. Casper was president of the American Academy in Berlin from July 2015 through July 2016; from August 2019 to January 24, 2020, he served as the institution's trustee-in-residence.
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Randy Barnett
#2763
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
#2761
Robert D. Kaplan
#2764
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Robert David Kaplan is an American author. His books are on politics, primarily foreign affairs, and travel. His work over three decades has appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The New Republic, The National Interest, Foreign Affairs and The Wall Street Journal, among other newspapers and publications.
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Ágnes Heller
#2765
Overall Influence
1929 - 2019 (90 years)
Ágnes Heller was a Hungarian philosopher and lecturer. She was a core member of the Budapest School philosophical forum in the 1960s and later taught political theory for 25 years at the New School for Social Research in New York City. She lived, wrote and lectured in Budapest.
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Étienne Balibar
#2766
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Étienne Balibar is a French philosopher. He has taught at the University of Paris X-Nanterre, at the University of California Irvine and is currently an Anniversary Chair Professor at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University and a visiting professor at the Department of French and Romance Philology at Columbia University.
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Elisabeth Lloyd
#2767
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Elisabeth Anne Lloyd is an American philosopher of science specialising in the philosophy of biology. She is currently Distinguished Professor of History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine - as well as Adjunct Professor of biology - at Indiana University, Bloomington, affiliated faculty scholar at the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction and Adjunct Faculty at the Center for the Integrative Study of Animal Behavior.
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Fan Chung
#2768
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Fan-Rong King Chung Graham , known professionally as Fan Chung, is an American mathematician who works mainly in the areas of spectral graph theory, extremal graph theory and random graphs, in particular in generalizing the Erdős–Rényi model for graphs with general degree distribution .
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Kathleen Booth
#2769
Overall Influence
1922 - 2022 (100 years)
Kathleen Hylda Valerie Booth was a British computer scientist and mathematician who wrote the first assembly language and designed the assembler and autocode for the first computer systems at Birkbeck College, University of London. She helped design three different machines including the ARC , SEC , and APEC.
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Shmuley Boteach
#2770
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Jacob Shmuel Boteach , commonly known as Shmuley Boteach , is an American rabbi, author, and television host. He is the author of 31 books, including the best-seller Kosher Sex: A Recipe for Passion and Intimacy and Kosher Jesus . For two seasons, he hosted the prime-time reality television series Shalom in the Home, which was one of the highest-rated shows on TLC. His outspokenness has earned him both praise and criticism; he has been described as one of the most influential Jews in the United States and the world.
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Harry Collins
#2771
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Harry Collins, FLSW , is a British sociologist of science at the School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, Wales. In 2012 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. In 2013, he was elected a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales.
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Seymour Benzer
#2772
Overall Influence
1921 - 2007 (86 years)
Seymour Benzer was an American physicist, molecular biologist and behavioral geneticist. His career began during the molecular biology revolution of the 1950s, and he eventually rose to prominence in the fields of molecular and behavioral genetics. He led a productive genetics research lab both at Purdue University and as the James G. Boswell Professor of Neuroscience, emeritus, at the California Institute of Technology.
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Katalin Karikó
#2773
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Katalin "Kati" Karikó is a Hungarian-American biochemist who specializes in ribonucleic acid -mediated mechanisms, particularly in vitro-transcribed messenger RNA for protein replacement therapy. Karikó laid the scientific groundwork for mRNA vaccines, overcoming major obstacles and skepticism in the scientific community. Karikó received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2023 for her work, along with American immunologist Drew Weissman.
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William A. Dembski
#2774
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Trained as a mathematician, philosopher, and theologian, William Albert “Bill” Dembski is a writer, editor, and researcher whose books and articles range over mathematics, engineering, philosophy, theology, and education. A past philosophy professor, he retired from teaching in 2013. A prominent proponent of intelligent design (ID), specifically for developing rigorous methods of design detection, he was a senior fellow of Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture until 2016 and is currently a member of Discovery’s Institute’s governing board. He has secured the rights from Cambridg...
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Robert M. Pirsig
#2775
Overall Influence
1928 - 2017 (89 years)
Robert Maynard Pirsig was an American writer and philosopher. He was the author of the philosophical novels Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values and Lila: An Inquiry into Morals , and he co-authored On Quality: An Inquiry Into Excellence: Selected and Unpublished Writings along with his wife and editor, Wendy Pirsig.
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Jin Yong
#2776
Overall Influence
1924 - 2018 (94 years)
Louis Cha Leung-yung , better known by his pen name Jin Yong , was a Chinese wuxia novelist and essayist who co-founded the Hong Kong daily newspaper Ming Pao in 1959 and served as its first editor-in-chief. He was Hong Kong's most famous writer, and is named along with Gu Long and Liang Yusheng as the "Three Legs of the Tripod of Wuxia".
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Constantinos Daskalakis
#2777
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Constantinos Daskalakis is a Greek theoretical computer scientist. He is a professor at MIT's Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department and a member of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He was awarded the Rolf Nevanlinna Prize and the Grace Murray Hopper Award in 2018.
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Richard K. Guy
#2778
Overall Influence
1916 - 2020 (104 years)
Richard Kenneth Guy was a British mathematician. He was a professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Calgary. He is known for his work in number theory, geometry, recreational mathematics, combinatorics, and graph theory. He is best known for co-authorship of Winning Ways for your Mathematical Plays and authorship of Unsolved Problems in Number Theory. He published more than 300 scholarly articles. Guy proposed the partially tongue-in-cheek "strong law of small numbers", which says there are not enough small integers available for the many tasks assigned to them – thus explaining many coincidences and patterns found among numerous cultures.
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Christopher A. Sims
#2779
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Christopher Albert Sims is an American econometrician and macroeconomist. He is currently the John J.F. Sherrerd '52 University Professor of Economics at Princeton University. Together with Thomas Sargent, he won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2011. The award cited their "empirical research on cause and effect in the macroeconomy".
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Gwendolyn Brooks
#2780
Overall Influence
1917 - 2000 (83 years)
Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks was an American poet, author, and teacher. Her work often dealt with the personal celebrations and struggles of ordinary people in her community. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry on May 1, 1950, for Annie Allen, making her the first African American to receive a Pulitzer Prize.
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Isabel Allende
#2781
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Isabel Angélica Allende Llona is a Chilean writer. Allende, whose works sometimes contain aspects of the genre magical realism, is known for novels such as The House of the Spirits and City of the Beasts , which have been commercially successful. Allende has been called "the world's most widely read Spanish-language author." In 2004, Allende was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2010, she received Chile's National Literature Prize. President Barack Obama awarded her the 2014 Presidential Medal of Freedom.
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Napoleon Chagnon
#2782
Overall Influence
1938 - 2019 (81 years)
Napoleon Alphonseau Chagnon was an American cultural anthropologist, professor of sociocultural anthropology at the University of Missouri in Columbia and member of the National Academy of Sciences. Chagnon was known for his long-term ethnographic field work among the Yanomamö, a society of indigenous tribal Amazonians, in which he used an evolutionary approach to understand social behavior in terms of genetic relatedness. His work centered on the analysis of violence among tribal peoples, and, using socio-biological analyses, he advanced the argument that violence among the Yanomami is fueled by an evolutionary process in which successful warriors have more offspring.
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Reuben Hersh
#2783
Overall Influence
1927 - 2020 (93 years)
Reuben Hersh was an American mathematician and academic, best known for his writings on the nature, practice, and social impact of mathematics. Although he was generally known as Reuben Hersh, late in life he sometimes used the name Reuben Laznovsky in recognition of his father's ancestral family name. His work challenges and complements mainstream philosophy of mathematics.
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Cynthia Dwork
#2784
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Cynthia Dwork is an American computer scientist best known for her contributions to cryptography, distributed computing, and algorithmic fairness. She is one of the inventors of differential privacy and proof-of-work.
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Tommy Franks
#2785
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Tommy Ray Franks is a retired United States Army general. His last army post was as the Commander of the United States Central Command, overseeing United States military operations in a 25-country region, including the Middle East. Franks succeeded General Anthony Zinni to this position on 6 July 2000 and served until his retirement on 7 July 2003. Franks was the United States general leading the attack on the Taliban in Afghanistan in response to the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and The Pentagon in 2001. He also oversaw the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam ...
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Penn Jillette
#2786
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Penn Fraser Jillette is an American magician, actor, musician, inventor, television presenter, and author, best known for his work with fellow magician Teller as half of the team Penn & Teller. The duo has been featured in numerous stage and television shows, such as Penn & Teller: Fool Us and Penn & Teller: Bullshit!, and is currently headlining in Las Vegas at The Rio. Jillette serves as the act's orator and raconteur.
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Bill Simmons
#2787
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
William John Simmons III is an American podcaster, sportswriter, and cultural critic who is the founder and CEO of the sports and pop culture website The Ringer. Simmons first gained attention with his website as "The Boston Sports Guy" and was recruited by ESPN in 2001, where he eventually operated the website Grantland and worked until 2015. At ESPN, he wrote for ESPN.com, hosted his own podcast on ESPN.com titled The B.S. Report and was an analyst for two years on NBA Countdown.
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Pete Hamill
#2788
Overall Influence
1935 - 2020 (85 years)
Pete Hamill was an American journalist, novelist, essayist and editor. During his career as a New York City journalist, he was described as "the author of columns that sought to capture the particular flavors of New York City's politics and sports and the particular pathos of its crime." Hamill was a columnist and editor for the New York Post and the New York Daily News.
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Idi Amin
#2789
Overall Influence
1923 - 2003 (80 years)
Idi Amin Dada Oumee was a Ugandan military officer and politician who served as the third president of Uganda from 1971 to 1979. He ruled as a military dictator and is considered one of the most brutal despots in modern world history.
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Roger Waters
#2790
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
George Roger Waters is an English musician and singer-songwriter. In 1965, he co-founded the rock band Pink Floyd as the bassist. Following the departure of the songwriter, Syd Barrett, in 1968, Waters became Pink Floyd's lyricist, co-lead vocalist and conceptual leader until his departure in 1985.
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Keith Giffen
#2791
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Keith Ian Giffen was an American comics artist and writer. He was known for his work for DC Comics on their Legion of Super-Heroes and Justice League titles as well as for being the co-creator of Lobo, Rocket Raccoon, and Jaime Reyes.
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Jean-Claude Milner
#2792
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Jean-Claude Milner is a linguist, philosopher and essayist. His specialist fields of endeavour are linguistics and psychoanalysis . In 1971, Milner was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he translated Noam Chomsky's Aspects of the Theory of Syntax into French. His work helped to establish the terminology of theory of syntax in the French school of generative grammar. Milner is now a professor at the University Paris Diderot and lives in Paris.
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Jeremy Corbyn
#2793
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Jeremy Bernard Corbyn is a British politician who served as Leader of the Opposition and Leader of the Labour Party from 2015 to 2020. On the political left of the Labour Party, Corbyn describes himself as a socialist. He has been Member of Parliament for Islington North since 1983. As of October 2020, Corbyn sits in the House of Commons as an independent, following the suspension of the whip.
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Robert Bolt
#2794
Overall Influence
1924 - 1995 (71 years)
Robert Oxton Bolt was an English playwright and a two-time Oscar-winning screenwriter, known for writing the screenplays for Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, and A Man for All Seasons, the latter two of which won him the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.
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David H. D. Warren
#2795
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
David H. D. Warren is a computer scientist who worked primarily on logic programming and in particular the programming language Prolog in the 1970s and 1980s. Warren wrote the first compiler for Prolog, and the Warren Abstract Machine execution environment for Prolog is named after him.
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David Remnick
#2796
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
David J. Remnick is an American journalist, writer, and editor. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for his book Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire, and is also the author of Resurrection and King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero. Remnick has been editor of The New Yorker magazine since 1998. He was named "Editor of the Year" by Advertising Age in 2000. Before joining The New Yorker, Remnick was a reporter and the Moscow correspondent for The Washington Post. He also has served on the New York Public Library board of trustees and is a member of the American Philosophical Society.
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Chris French
#2797
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
#2795
Julian Jaynes
#2798
Overall Influence
1920 - 1997 (77 years)
Julian Jaynes was an American researcher in psychology at Yale and Princeton for nearly 25 years, best known for his 1976 book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. His career was dedicated to the problem of consciousness, "...the difference between what others see of us and our sense of our inner selves and the deep feelings that sustain it. ... Men have been conscious of the problem of consciousness almost since consciousness began." Jaynes' solution touches on many disciplines, including neuroscience, linguistics, psychology, archeology, history, religion and ...
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Paul Slovic
#2799
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Paul Slovic is a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon and the president of Decision Research. Decision Research is a collection of scientists from all over the nation and in other countries that study decision-making in times when risks are involved. He was also the president for the Society of Risk Analysis until 1984. He earned his undergraduate degree at Stanford University in 1959 and his PhD in psychology at the University of Michigan in 1964 and has received honorary doctorates from the Stockholm School of Economics and the University of East Anglia. He is past president of the Society for Risk Analysis and in 1991 received its Distinguished Contribution Award.
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Peter van Inwagen
#2800
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Peter van Inwagen is an American analytic philosopher and the John Cardinal O'Hara Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. He is also a research professor of philosophy at Duke University each spring. He previously taught at Syracuse University, earning his PhD from the University of Rochester in 1969 under the direction of Richard Taylor. Van Inwagen is one of the leading figures in contemporary metaphysics, philosophy of religion, and philosophy of action. He was the president of the Society of Christian Philosophers from 2010 to 2013.
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Ryszard Kapuściński
#2801
Overall Influence
1932 - 2007 (75 years)
Ryszard Kapuściński was a Polish journalist, photographer, poet and author. He received many awards and was considered a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Kapuściński's personal journals in book form attracted both controversy and admiration for blurring the conventions of reportage with the allegory and magical realism of literature. He was the Communist-era Polish Press Agency's only correspondent in Africa during decolonization, and also worked in South America and Asia. Between 1956 and 1981 he reported on 27 revolutions and coups, until he was fired because of his support for the pro-democracy Solidarity movement in his native country.
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Rasmus Lerdorf
#2802
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Rasmus Lerdorf is a Danish-Canadian programmer. He co-authored and inspired the PHP scripting language, authoring the first two versions of the language and participating in the development of later versions led by a group of developers including Jim Winstead , Stig Bakken, Shane Caraveo, Andi Gutmans, and Zeev Suraski. He continues to contribute to the project.
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Makoto Shinkai
#2803
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Makoto Niitsu, known as Makoto Shinkai, is a Japanese animator, filmmaker, author, and manga artist. Shinkai began his career as a video game animator with Nihon Falcom in 1996, and gained recognition as a filmmaker with the release of the original video animation She and Her Cat . Beginning his longstanding association with CoMix Wave Films, Shinkai then released the science-fiction OVA Voices of a Distant Star in 2002, and followed this with his debut feature film The Place Promised in Our Early Days .
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